endings without end: when prophecy fails and the … · 12-05-2014 · endings without end: when...
TRANSCRIPT
Endings Without End: When Prophecy Fails and the Rise of New Age Spirituality and
Cognitive Dissonance1
Betty M. Bayer
(This paper is a work-in-progress: Please do not quote, reproduce or circulate without
prior permission of the author – thanks.)
It may seem rather unconventional to begin on a note of endings, but when one’s topic is
prophecies, especially failed prophecies, one finds oneself without usual recourse to
beginnings. A bit of a spoiler, to be sure, to begin with the closing act. No surprise, no
moment of anticipation, or is there? When I tell someone I am preparing a history of
Festinger, Riecken and Schachter’s 1956 social psychology book When Prophecy Fails,2
their replies often run counter to expectation. Recently, one went something like this:
Ah, so, how did things pan out? I paused, wondering if they were asking me in that nod-
nod, wink-wink kind of way about some failure on my part to recognize the title’s tell all:
“When Prophecy Fails.” In my moment of hesitation, however, they leaned in to repeat
their question, as if I had not heard them. As if I had failed to grasp what question was
being asked. To my mind, there dawned, in that moment’s pause, a crucial distinction.
For what, in the end, their questions directed me to has less to do with endings, or
beginnings of the end, and more with what this story of failed prophecy reveals.
This distinction is pivotal for at least two reasons. For one, we live in a culture
saturated by end-time discourse, perhaps even more than at the time of the study in mid-
fifties America, a time culturally attuned by systems of surveillance, secrecy, and the
Doomsday Clock poised for a second year at two minutes to midnight, a time when
2
people were said to want their religion to be a little more psychological and when the
psychological was being wrought through cybernetics to be a little more cognitive.3 For
another, many today are conversant with end-time cries, hearing in them larger notions
than letter-for-letter predictions. Both of these are discernible from the study’s outset to
its vast cultural absorption today.
Just days before the prophesied end investigated in Festinger et al.’s work, a
Chicago Daily News headline deemed its “prophetess,” Dorothy Martin of Oak Park,
Illinois, student of theosophy, “calm on cataclysm eve,” December 20, 1954. Often
featured in such newspaper stories alongside Dorothy Martin, better known by the
pseudonym Mrs. Marion Keech given to her by the authors of When Prophecy Fails, was
her colleague Dr. Charles Laughead, called Dr. Armstrong in the book. He was also
declared calm on the prophecy’s eve, despite having been fired from Michigan State
College’s health staff for his “end of the world” teachings. Claiming his group was not a
cult or religious sect, Laughead noted that a small group met “under the auspices of the
People Church of East Lansing” and was known as the “‘quest’ group” who discussed
saucers, philosophy, ancient mysticism and the “atomic war that disturbs saucer men”—
the unbalancing of the universe.4 Just weeks before, the Chicago Sun-Times ran the story
“Tidal Wave Reactions” surveying what Chicagoans would do if they believed Martin’s
prediction of the city being “washed away by a tidal wave.”5 Most surveyed “seemed
unconcerned,” unrattled: “Some of those asked indicated they would advance and enlarge
their New Year’s Eve celebration in to a real fling.”6 Others told the Sun Times “they
wouldn’t change any plans.”7
3
Four days before the prophesied end by flood, a Chicago Daily News headline
read: “‘End of the World is Near!’ – It’s an Old Cry in History.” It is an old cry in history
but is it the same old cry? Today, one senses end-time talk has become rather banal,
punctuating everyday discourse as if we are at a loss for descriptors of severe or
bothersome conditions and so we add the suffix –pocalypse to all manner of things:
snowpocalypse, wordpocalypse (words that need to be wiped out from everyday talk),
zombie apocalypse (a little overkill, if you ask me), and we encounter endless media
reports of “it’s the end of the world as we know it.” Use of the word apocalypse shows
steady increase in books from the 1950s on, spiking, not unsurprisingly, perhaps, between
1990 and 2012.8
All of which brings me back to the point of a cultural conversancy with end-
times. On this read, my interlocutors are indicating how never-ending invocations of
“apocalypse” to render social, cultural, political, economic, environmental and all
assorted catastrophe cataclysmic are now not only unbelievable but also unlikely. 9
One
senses in their questions a more cosmic horizon of inquiry: Is that all there is – the end?
To what larger worlds might a world’s ending point? In the end, those puzzled by the tale
of When Prophecy Fails may be attuned to how endings extend themselves out to
frontiers of subjective and objective worlds, to matters of consciousness and human
existence—a hearkening to what a prophetic apocalypse reveals about worlds beyond or
other than endings, invoking, in the quest, apocalypse’s etymological meaning: to
uncover, to disclose, to reveal.10
4
It may not all have been for naught, then, that Leon Festinger came to call the
psychological phenomenon arising from that December night of failed prophecy
cognitive dissonance. For dissonance, drawing on ideas from musical dissonance, as this
psychological concept does, may be said to connote foreshadowing and revelation. Early
twentieth century composers and artists used dissonance in new ways and to new effect,
with some claiming their new age of dissonance foretold tonality or consonance’s
collapse and/or opened another window to the soul. Likening dissonant compositions to
streams of consciousness, expressing the inner spiritual necessity of an age, or giving
voice to inner turmoil, dissonance resonated with that era’s clamor of war, fragmentation
and chaos as with other moments when innovations in dissonance sounded the age’s
ferment in a language of transformations at the very level of who we are.11
Of note, of
course, is Olivier Messiaen’s composition, “Quartet for the End of Time,” prepared while
a prisoner-of-war at Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz. Inspired by the line in Revelation, “There
shall be time no longer,” Messiaen’s piece is described as the “gentlest apocalypse
imaginable.”12
Its innovative rhythms evoked a new hearing on time by dispensing with
conventional notions of meter and musical time, such as regular beats, so reminiscent of
marching and war, of time marching on. To Messiaen, changing compositions of rhythm
corresponded to changed understanding of temporal orders, a break with metrics of the
future as that through which the past becomes converted into meaning. His rhythms
invoked time outside such metrics of history, time as the “starting point of all things.”13
New musical forms or techniques of creating dissonance carried implications for
understandings of reason, self, consciousness, social order and the cosmos. If the modern
subject could come to hear what at first seemed to be inharmonious sounds or melodies
5
as having a form of harmony, then, or so the thinking seemed to go, might this new
dissonance also signal the end of a form of ordering the world, an end to psychological
and social certainties? Whether of mythic proportion or not, one cannot escape how
dissonance came to be both sign and practice of psychic and social life in western
twentieth century music, social theory, literature and the arts. Few deny dissonance’s
grip on imagining the modern subject, its tones of meaning beating through and through
with those of spirituality, including theosophy,14
its contrapuntal innovations calling us to
new modes of listening to culture and history, even as debate remains open as to what
extent this moment’s experiments with dissonance, with sound, time and psyche,
transformed or revealed anew the modern subject.
Exerting an equal hold and set of implications is the case of Festinger’s 1950s
rendition of dissonance as cognitive dissonance, a theory absorbed so thoroughly by
academic and popular discourse our age itself is said to peal with like signs and acoustic
symptoms of cognitive dissonance.
Terms and Scales of Meaning
Prophecy, dissonance and cognition are capacious concepts, further enlarged by
their own distinct histories as well as by their historical imbroglio. To embark on a
project of their historical detail is a task made all the more meaningful by their many-
tentacled conceptual and historical reach into music, literature, astronomy, religion,
psychology and science as much as by their power to summon order in the cosmos,
universe, and nature, and even to sound “first beginnings.” Conceptually, this trio
reminds us of our need to know how things will go, our preference for order,
predictability and for surprises and the unpredictable.15
These are tensions neither
6
resolvable into measures of time nor balanced by re-orderings of psychological or
spiritual life or sweetening of life’s routine with a surprise here and there, now and then.
Much as relations between dissonance and consonance are not reducible to part and
counterpart or dichotomies of thought,16
these relational tensions, this longing for balance
or harmony among spheres of life – inner and outer – is a dynamically orchestrated co-
performance created in the “medium of time.”17
In terms drawn from functionalist
theory, a chord’s identity as consonant or dissonant “depends on the company it keeps,”18
and, by extension, that references disciplinary boundaries and ways their interrelations
are thought resolved in ideas of interdisciplinarity. That such “category-mistakes”
trouble music theory and history is well recognized, if rarely corrected;19
these troubles
arise as well in the many and varied adoptions of the theory of cognitive dissonance. For
dissonance shifts and changes by its adoption and renditions, as does cognition. To
capture their essence is a little like trying to hold on to a fading note. A sense of its
sound lingers even as it morphs into other sonorous dimensions. Capacious and
unwieldy, deliberated upon and the source of disputation, short-lived and seemingly
eternal, and yet exercising a force to effect the very ways we come to imagine and
reinvent who we are and to puzzle out mysteries of the worlds in which we find
ourselves, prophecy, dissonance and cognition are central terms with which to contend.
To pursue their entanglement in When Prophecy Fails is as much reminder of their
formative powers as it is to underscore the need to renew engagement with them and, by
extension, necessarily, their reincarnations in psychology, science, religion and
spirituality.
7
Parts Played Against One Another
What sort of sounding board is dissonance for history, the psyche and notions of the self?
For isn’t dissonance’s early twentieth century challenge to tonality coincident with
expanding consciousness of inner worlds, to experiment with its expressive forms, to give
an ear, as some put it, to the psyche’s double step of anguish and joy or, as others said, to
compose a spiritual philosophy of multicultural utopia or a reconciliation of science and
mysticism?20
And, isn’t mid-twentieth century cognitive dissonance with Festinger’s
focus on persistence of beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, such as end-time
prophecies, about making sense of how humans appear counter-intuitive to a rational
calculus of the mind, a more conservative idea? True, one could imagine the earlier
moment as an opening to wonder and the later “post-tonal” one, as given over to a
rationalization or intellectualization21
of the counterintuitive, a closing of wonder. Such a
narrative would make of the history of cognitive dissonance but one more element in that
larger and well-rehearsed plot line of the western world’s continuing secularization. It
would also leave unexamined that implicit twinned association of psychology and
secularity, and of one calling out the other – that is, an implied two-way causal relation of
becoming more psychological and more secular. But does the contrapuntal line not have
a resonance of its own too? That is, an association of becoming more psychological and
more spiritual or religious? These historical plotlines and sets of assumptions are
precisely the historical and conceptual knot my research seeks to tease apart to grant a
new hearing to the paradigmatic When Prophecy Fails and the theory of cognitive
dissonance.
8
To listen again is to listen for this history’s discordant notes: How was it that the same
century in which we purportedly became more psychological and secular was also the
same century in which we ostensibly became equally more spiritual? How did the transit
from religious or New Age spirituality and prophecy to cognitive dissonance become, in
the end, a matter of psychological rather than spiritual or religious tension? That is, the
measure of rationality cognitive dissonance was envisioned to instance relied first on
Martin’s New Age prophecy, one the authors devoted considerable print space to placing
in the context of other failed religious prophecies, and, as a second step, abjuring the
religious or spiritual in the theory of cognitive dissonance itself. As this reflection will
show, the spiritual acoustic unconscious returns, manifesting as a form of irrationality.
This repudiation and recurrence is good reminder of the forgotten rudiments in the story
of Narcissus, his “refusal to hear Echo’s invocations of love.”22
Here, though, the story is
of a discipline replaying its history, unable to hear in its questions, concepts and theories
neighboring resonances made to sound all too far afield.
What transpires, one wonders, for the modern subject in that moment of turning
the extraordinary powers of prophecy into ordinary irrationality or madness, a practice
embedded in an ontology “guaranteeing that all are in principle explicable.”23
No wonder,
there. We are led to ask what the nature of cognitive dissonance’s relation to religion and
spirituality is, and what implications this has had in its psychological conversion to
cognitive renditions of the mind, religion and spirituality. This question is one of
historical mishearing: What goes missing from consciousness and affective life when a
discipline such as psychology bases its study on spirituality as an already determined
“other” on which to set the terms of its concept or theory and then eschews this “other”
9
on the grounds of its irrationality or madness? What happens to understandings of the
psyche? Of religious experience? To urge the question along: What, if anything, goes
missing or ends? What other worlds of meaning and ways of understanding ourselves, the
mind, reason and rationality were surrendered in this twentieth century of uncertainty
with its resonant strain upon strain of dissonant music, literature and theory unraveling
one after another end without end, one and another formulation of the modern subject?
Changing Scales and Scales of Change
These questions inform the larger arc of my history of When Prophecy Fails and
cognitive dissonance. It is an arc that extends to wonders at disciplinary partings of the
way that nonetheless return, such as those of religion and spirituality in psychological
science, burnished anew in novel psychological terms. This is not a history of the
psychology of religion, or the religion of psychology, or the science of religion or of
psychology. Rather it is a history of how science, religion and psychology egg one
another along, the tangle of their relations. It is a history that finds itself incomplete
without the arc of William James’s treatment of consciousness and varieties of religious
experience through to his astute rendering of medical materialism or reductionism. A
“sad discordancy,” writes James, attends medical materialism’s measure of moments of
“sentimental and mystical experience,” as of genius and as signs of disease alike.24
“Medical materialism,” he continues, “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the
road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It
snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary
degenerate.”25
Philosopher Isabelle Stengers, drawing on James, also inquires into how “a
10
being of faith, the Blessed Virgin for example,” becomes turned into matters of what
exist and what does not (categorically or symbolically) thereby failing to consider the
Virgin Mary’s own particular force or effects.26
Historian of religion, Leigh Eric
Schmidt addresses how a “psychological shift in perspective” functioned to silence or to
turn into sensory illusions “a numinous angel, the rustling leaves that became whispering
voices, the statue that came to life.”27
Whereas Schmidt’s history attends to a
disenchantment of an acoustic unconscious, a loss of acoustic consciousness in religion,
Ann Harrington’s history of the science of mind-cures attends to that productive
conjunction of science and knowledge at the level of embodiment. Not only does she
observe how understandings of hypnosis changed over time but that the “mental and
physiological experience of hypnosis -- what it is” underwent change too, and “in ways
that clearly reflect changing social expectations and morés.”28
Further, historian Molly
McGarry traces “historical crossings, marking a moment” when Spiritualist thought
meets up with emerging discourses of sexual science and with science and secularism.29
McGarry proposes Spiritualism persists in neurological, psychological and medical
discourse as a “residual discourse,” defined by Raymond Williams as an element “formed
in the past but … still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an
element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.”30
One is struck by certain
resonances across these authors, whether of spiritualism’s residual discourse in notions of
fragmented and multileveled consciousness31
or in dynamics between spirituality,
religion and secularism in notions of mind and consciousness,32
of how we hear who we
are and imagine the world in which we live. Their works reveal an arc of “mores”,
James’s mediating term for how there is “actually and literally more life in our total soul
11
than we are at any time aware of”33
and stretch out this “more” to encompass the
networks operating amongst science, religion, spirituality and psychology, despite their
assumed divisions. A larger dissonance is made resonant here, one extending and
illuminating anew When Prophecy Fails.
Two moments are illustrative: the night of the failed prophecy and the emergence
of psychology’s cognitive dissonance, and a recent use by Barbara Herrnstein Smith of
When Prophecy Fails and its theory in contemporary debate on the new natural theology
and cognition. But, first, an excursus.
Dissonance and Historiographical Unrest
In my work, dissonance operates not only as a conceptual and historical object of
investigation, but also as an opening into rethinking how we carry out historical
scholarship. Histories such as those examining the disenchantment of the ear, the force
of apparitions or symbols to set in motion pilgrimages and piety or changes in the body at
the level of embodied senses or spirituality in the making of the mind, reason and
consciousness are thorny by their very nature. For attention to spirituality, especially
New Age Spirituality, inevitably prompts questions about the psychological status of the
prophets or the group members, including in the case of When Prophecy Fails whether
there are signs of or information on whether Dorothy Martin, who was threatened with
psychiatric treatment, had epileptic seizures or a traumatic childhood, or suffered from
auditory hallucinations and/or some other medical-psychological disorder. Similar
questions arise regarding Charles Laughead, who underwent a court-ordered psychiatric
examination in light of charges of mental incompetency filed by his sister. In
12
undertaking these histories, one wrestles with the twin horns of the dilemma: either
someone is mad or their beliefs are mad. Either the psyche has gone astray or the
spiritual or religious beliefs have run amok.
To steer clear of such well-trodden ground means holding in tension various
contrary parts to raise new questions about psychology, science, religion and spirituality
and to move discussion beyond iterations of believers in or redeemers of either the small
millennial group and their new religious movement or the research social psychologists.34
Such histories compel their own unique historiographical needs, I would argue, ones that
break with limited notions of historicity, much as reinventions of dissonance of the
twentieth century sought to achieve.
So, here I borrow from twentieth century versions of dissonance in music and the
arts as an experimental tool in conceiving of and investigating human nature (and the
cosmos). If dissonance instructs historiography, which I think it does, it may be to
reformulate it, as well as its kin relations, history of science and science studies, along
lines proposed by Wai Chee Dimock in her literary theory of resonance to give a new
“profile to the concepts of historicity and context.”35
She sounded a challenge to time-
and place-bound notions of historicity whose context-delimiting frameworks may oblige
words and texts to stay within and be contained by particular times and places. Looking
at resonances outside time-and-place specific contexts, however, may reveal significant
meaning. This type of resonant history not only considers residual discourses (or what
lingers and endures) but what tensions resonate in new ways, what lives on to propagate
afresh and to disturb domesticated orders of knowledge,36
and what seemingly inessential
or incidental tones become, through certain resonances, newly heard as significant.37
13
One is put in mind here of Kathryn Lofton’s contrapuntal moves in historical
scholarship of religion, where, by inquiring into history as religious studies object,
counter tenors of religious studies’ microtones and macrotones become audible,38
something akin to pianist Glenn Gould’s radio experiment in the early 1960s to recreate
by means of simultaneously recorded contrapuntal voices and music The Idea of North
(in Canada).39
Each reads the signs of their respective lands, to paraphrase from Gould’s
program, to find in the most minute, the infinite, the dissonance not resolved. Two
additional theorists amplify. Arnold Schoenberg, composer, painter, theorist and key
figure of the new “emancipation of dissonance,” as he phrased it, writes of dissonance as
stirring unrest: “a state of rest is placed in question through a contrast. From this unrest a
motion proceeds.”40
He elaborates:
The primitive ear hears the tone as irreducible, but physics recognizes it to
be complex. In the meantime, however, musicians discovered that it is
capable of continuation, i.e., that movement is latent in it. That problems
are concealed in it, problems that clash with one another, that the tone
lives and seeks to propagate itself.41
Schoenberg’s theory of dissonance resonates with certain features of William James’s
multiverse, described as the “strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or
concatenation.”42
Here too discord is operative in one phenomenon’s contrary relation
with another that “conceals all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and
hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership.”43
James’ multiverse collects within its analytic frame extensions in time, proximity
as a principle of association, and relation through chains they create;44
Schoenberg directs
one to movement that lies latent in resonance, movement from which emerges something
14
unheard or the creation of a new sense of harmony. Things travel through time; things
affect one another in their transit; sometimes their resonances sound a new depth of
meaning, sometimes heard out of time and sometimes heard as a clash of symbols,
concepts and texts, what Dimock calls a “timely unwieldiness.”45
This unwieldiness pays
homage to “time both as a medium of unrecoverable meaning and as a medium of newly
possible meanings.”46
Dissonances, as, perhaps, hearing or hearing of prophecies, have a momentum of
their own. Their resonant tensions worry the terrain of change, of metamorphoses, of
ontological meaning, of wonder, of a search for ratio, which “always lurk[s] just a little
bit beyond the ordinary, the obvious explanation.”47
They are endings without end,
echoing longingly across the ages humanity’s refrain of how to begin (again), to hear
anew: Who are we? How are we to dwell here together? What bodes for humanity’s
future – harmony? disharmony?
Cognitive Dissonance’s Resonant Chamber
What kicked off Festinger’s mid-twentieth century dissonance research was a growing
interest in how communications travelled and how they gathered within them significant
resound. This is the vexing problem of felt resonances in communication, the more often
than not inaudible strains of acoustic conscious and unconscious worlds. One might hear
something – a message, news, prophecy, or communication of some sort – but that tells
one little about how it will be received or shared with or orient one to others. To begin to
map communication flow, one had to trace out less visible and audible networks of social
relations and influence operating in what Festinger called the psychological
environment.48
Communications resonated; they had a momentum of their own, could
15
set other things in motion, were unpredictable in their effects, and often had manifest or
latent within them emotions, motives, desires and longing.
What intrigued Festinger were not those consonances where information,
behavior and the psychological environment fell into more comforting constellated
harmonies. His questions were more in tune with the dissonant times of mid-twentieth
century America’s tensions and turmoil around rumors, secrets, and political
transgressions. Rumors, such as those associated with communist propaganda, for
example, took on a life of their own, creating or sustaining psychological environments,
with little grounding in fact, or what could be taken for fact. The number of
contingencies in any effort to chart such psychological environments seemed
astronomical.
However daunting the task, four institutions, the University of Chicago’s
Committee on Social Thought, Harvard University (sociology), Columbia University’s
Bureau of Applied Social Research and University of Minnesota’s Laboratory for
Research in Social Relations, were brought together by the Ford Foundation to inventory
the status of knowledge within the fields of social stratification, child development
(socialization), political behavior and social communication and social influence. The
aim of these inventories was to determine the status of knowledge on what influences
human conduct. Festinger’s field of expertise was social communication and social
influence, and he formed, as did each expert at the other three institutions, a team of
researchers to work together over several years to complete the inventory. Planning
proposals detailed a vast and wide swath of literature to be reviewed in the humanities
and social sciences, from Aristotle to Marx, from Simmel, Weber and Durkheim to Park,
16
Parsons, Homans and from Freud to Allport, Sherif, and Asch, to name a few.49
Works
under study in Festinger’s group, composed of a philosopher, sociologists and later social
psychologists, covered a vast range of disciplines, from American Studies to history and
literature, and from political science to public opinion psychology, including John
Hershey’s Hiroshima, Bruno Bettleheim’s Rumors and Communications in
Concentration Camps, Mike Jay’s The Unfortunate Colonel Despard, volumes of the
Irish Rebellion Rumors, Henry Smith’s The Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth, Hadley Cantril’s Invasion from Mars, A Study in the Psychology of Panic50
and Clara Endicott Sears’ Days of Delusion51
(a study of the Millerites). Events of
interest ranged from disaster, disease, catastrophe, and prisoner-of-war camps (in
Germany, Canada and the U.S.), through to military and navy troops, lynching, mass
poisoning, interracial tensions, race riots in Chicago, and so on.
Their inventory took shape around anxiety-provoking versus anxiety-reducing
rumors and fears, how beliefs were justified, and any disjuncture between the “reality of a
situation” and your “picture of the environment.”52
As early as 1952, Festinger specified,
“[d]issonance or consonance is not between the behavior and psychological environment
but between or among parts of the psychological environment. Communication serves to
change the psychological environment.” Of most interest then were the resonances of
social communication, how the over- and undertones reverberating amongst persons –
joy, sorrow, feelings of loss, anger, fear, anxiety – had a sort of agency in cognition’s
psychological environment.53
Just as dissonant tones altered the sound of music
following them, or, some have argued, modern interiority, so the reverberation of social
17
communication, its feeling structure, was vital to what and how people made sense of
things and responded.
Of the innumerable works they inventoried, three held Festinger’s and his
research team’s interest from the early phase on. One was an anthropology dissertation
on rumors in Japanese relocation centers;54
a second was a study following rumors after
the great 1934 earthquake in Bihar, India.55
Between the two a pattern emerged of rumors
and their tendency to multiply unrestrainedly “strange, baseless, and even absurd” reports
and of being stoked by wonder and fear.
Arguably, though, it was lay historian Clara Endicott Sears’ aforementioned work
Days of Delusion: A Strange Bit of History, that would become if not foundational a
touchstone for dissonance theory. Sears placed a notice in many leading newspapers
around 1920, calling for recollections of the “great religious excitement in 1843, the year
that William Miller predicted the end of the world.”56
She drew on others describing the
broader psychology of this historical moment as a “remarkable agitation of the mind.”57
The year 1843, she writes, “was also a year of great revival among the Shakers….all
discovering mediumistic powers within themselves, and … continually conversing with
those long dead, and with prophets, martyrs and scriptural characters.”58
Emerson, she
writes, captured the feel of things in his description of a “Convention of Friends of
Universal Reform”: “If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen,
Madwomen, Men with beards, Dunnkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners,
Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and
Philosophers – all came successively to the top.”59
Described in different ways, this old
New Age, as Leigh Eric Schmidt refers to it, may be understood as central to the story of
18
modern interiority, a history that, for some, meant moving away from “’religions of
authority’ into the new ‘religion of the spirit’.”60
There is a felt resonance between this earlier moment described by Sears and the
1950s, during which time the dilemmas of the day were said to be written “soul sized.”61
Insofar as social psychology pursued the mind’s rational calculus, a corresponding
religio-spiritual inward quest sought to find reason in “the universal primordial wisdom
of humankind, now secreted only in the arcane language of myth and symbol.”62
Both
pursuits, however, arose during Cold War America and both seemed acclimated, as much
of psychology itself was, to notions of balance, consistency, and contiguity. Just as
David Riesman was lamenting Americans’ lack of inward direction, Norman Vincent
Peale was expounding a psychospiritual power from within. Each view was featured in
1954 issues of Time Magazine within a month of one another, though Riesman did grab
the front cover.63
There was a transverse plane of the American psyche taking shape
from America’s overarching narrative of its age as the “end of innocence.” Ideologies
could capitalize on weak minds, reason alone offered questionable assurance as an “ethic
of power,” deceptive illusions could exert a formidable hold, and groups, collectives,
could be a force of their own.64
Relations amongst theology, religion, spirituality,
psychoanalysis and the budding field of cognitive psychology were tossed up in this
age’s effort to shore up the American psyche, or at least harness the individual’s if not the
nation’s ego to reason and rationality. Matters of surveillance and worries over
conformity were parlayed into psychological, religious and spiritual renditions of the
inner-outer problem: Was the populace simply driven by outer forces or was there an
equally strong inner-directed “gyroscope,” as Riesman referred to it?
19
Theorists differed, to be sure, but what Festinger sought to chart was the field of
information as a circulating medium of tensions amongst cognitions, propelling people to
resolve dissonance. By late summer of 1954, Festinger, having been joined by Stanley
Schachter and Henry Riecken, had a good handle on what he saw as the contingencies
and conditions of dissonance and consonance. What he was missing was a psychological
environment in which to test them. How he longed, recalled Riecken, for some historical
event, something comparable to the Millerites, to give dissonance theory its test. Then,
as luck would have it, on a routine morning checking the stock market pages in the
newspaper, Schachter came across the story of Dorothy Martin’s prophecy in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune on September 24, 1954. The headline read: “Head for the Ark,
folks! ‘Word from Space’ Says Flood’s Due.”
A Mid-1950s Suburban Prophecy
The story had been picked up from the Chicago Daily News on September 23,
1954, and it remains a mystery as to how or why the Chicago Daily News reported the
story or the Minneapolis Star Tribune picked it up. But they did, and Dorothy Martin,
born in West Virginia in 1900, moving from there to Oak Park, Illinois by way of New
York, became headline and sometimes front-page news in local and national newspapers
over the next five months.
Martin had been a registered member of the Theosophy Society for at least one
year, was most interested in theosophist Alice Bailey’s writings, and had a longstanding
interest in outer and inner space herself, including channeled communications. By one
account, her first religious vision came following her prayers for pain relief during
20
treatment in Waterloo, Canada for lymphatic cancer. Prior to this she had had a vision on
the night her father died while she was hospitalized from serious injuries incurred in a car
accident. Subsequently she began to receive messages from her father. Elsewhere
Dorothy Martin recalls having had “extra sensory perception” from a young age, seeking
out, around 1940, the spiritual teacher Paramhansa Yogananda, founder of “Self-
Realization Fellowship.” In the first story publicly announcing her prophecy, Dorothy
Martin recounts her “prophecy from planet” as one of six months of communiqués
channeled to her from beings from afar. Furnished with a photograph of her, pen poised,
the story “Clarion Call to City: Flee That Flood” relayed how it all began one Easter
Sunday morning, when, while “lying in bed on the sun-porch of her home,” Dorothy
Martin’s arm began to feel warm and she felt an urge to write. She then just “put a
pencil to paper and wrote,” filling her notebook with channeled messages, what she
called “lessons from her teachers,” including the prophecy of the flood to arrive on winter
solstice, 1954. With this prophecy’s disconfirmation, Dorothy Martin received a message
deferring the end’s arrival to Christmas Eve. “Sing your songs of the season,” instructed
the message channeled to Dorothy Martin from outer space, “And faithful may join us.”65
So directed, Dorothy Martin, her main associates, the Laughead family (parents
Dr. Charles S and Lillian Louise and three children, Charlyn, Charles Jr., and Marilyn),
and a number of other “unidentified” group members gathered together in front of
Dorothy’s home. The group broke into song at 5:55 p.m. Six o’clock came and went
without a sign of the anticipated Mars space ship rapture. They continued to sing. Still,
no sign. At 6:35 p.m., Dorothy Martin and her followers stopped singing. Where her
group had filled this winter’s evening’s air with voices of anticipation, a kind of hush fell
21
over them, the kind of quiet wonder incredulity summons. Who could believe the space
ship would not show? Who could believe it would?
From September 1954 into the new year, and unbeknownst to Dorothy Martin and
Charles Laughead, they were the subjects of social psychological study. Festinger,
Schachter, and Riecken had joined the group as undercover participant observers, and
they had hired and orchestrated a number of graduate students from Michigan and
Chicago to also don disguise and join the group. Two undercover sociology graduate
student researchers were in East Lansing, Michigan, one serving as a babysitter for the
Laugheads when they visited Oak Park. At least two undercover graduate students were
from the University of Chicago (sociology), and, based on my archival and interview
research, at least two other undercover graduate students were involved. Nor were these
subjects aware of the book about to be published on their lives during this time. And they
could not have had inkling of how the book, the theory, and their lives would come to be
defined by and to define a moment both within social psychology and what came to be
called the cognitive turn, and within New Age spiritual and religious movements.
22
Endings without End
Figure 1. Night of failed prophecy. (AP archives)
This photograph66
of the night of failed prophecy summons us to revisit the beginnings
and endings of a study carried out under secrecy and the lives whose stories under fictive
names it narrates. For surely this night as the book, the theory, and the New Age moment
came to have a new hold on the American psyche, its popular discourse, and ensuing
debates on religious experience, psychology and science. Magnifying this prophetic
drama as one of unknown worlds is the well-known photographer Charles E. Knoblock’s
use of light and shadow, creating a cosmic umbra, an eclipse of one world by another.
Onlookers try to hear the story of one world, Dorothy Martin’s, only to seek resonances
in others.
23
No one could have predicted the endless ribbon that would unwind from this
study. Virtually every academic discipline has drawn on it, the book was fictionalized in
1967 by Alison Lurie in the novel Imaginary Friends to elucidate the tangle of objective
observers and subjects in participant observer studies, and then her novel was adapted for
a BBC television drama.67
A proposal was made to turn When Prophecy Fails into a
musical in the early 1960s,68
and, in the year 2000, Darcey Steinke, a descendent of
William Miller’s family, published a short story drawing directly on the book. Other
readers use the book as a field guide to their own personal experiences of religion.69
The
resonances become more far-flung over the decades. Today, metal bands take their
names from the title of the book or the theory, Adbusters claims cognitive dissonance as
its activist tool to disrupt ordinary consumer consciousness, a recent podcast claims this
term to flag its mission of religious de-conversion stories,70
and psychology offers a test
of cognitive dissonance as if it is a state of being. Even more curious is how cognitive
dissonance is invoked in historical and theoretical study of dissonance, as if a stand-alone
phrase. The term is also virtually inescapable in day-to-day talk. My personal favorite
was when someone, who does not know my research area, told me her daughter was
experiencing a double cognitive dissonance, as if the term was self-explanatory.
If indeed we may claim cognitive dissonance as a commonplace of discourse
today, and if it is not a conceit to say it signifies predicaments in contemporary life, then
surely its resonance across academic and popular fields invites another hearing.
Considered one of the most well-established, enduring and generative theories in social
psychology, cognitive dissonance has enjoyed a parallel longevity in religious,
24
millennialism, and cognitive religion studies. These fields’ respective patterns of citation
reveal an age-old discord. Psychological research most often cites Festinger’s subsequent
1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, while religion, theology and religious
studies citations as new age spirituality more often expressly cite, discuss and retest the
book When Prophecy Fails.71
The most recent Oxford handbook of millennialism, for
example, opens with Festinger’s study and theory as framing the field paradigmatically.72
These two paths of citation use indicate a division between the fields in historical
emphases on epistemology over ontology, a partition resounded as well in discussion of
relations amongst science, psychology and religion. To catch the resonance across these
deployments is to detect at one and the same time Festinger’s interest in the persistence
of belief as a question about the persistence of religious belief, an undertone made
palpable by his lengthy preface of religious traditions and their failed prophecies.
Historians of scientific psychology did not miss a certain irony to cognitive
dissonance’s first associations with persistence in religious beliefs while eclipsing the
case of science, suggesting religion’s pursuit as something other than science’s of
knowledge. Edwin Boring, historian of psychology, for example, put on record “seven
instances of occasions on which the scientist proceeds in the face of cognitive
dissonance.”73
But he directs this record to how cognitive dissonance may make the
investigator “more effective” by “pushing the contradiction aside and his going on with
whatever business he has in hand.” This, he argues, follows from choosing a “prescribed
universe” within which to work. Others, such as Solomon Asch, in his 1957 review of
the theory of cognitive dissonance, direct attention to the book’s and the theory’s
reductive treatment of discord; Asch titled his review “Cacophonophobia,”74
a fear of
25
jarring sounds signaling a larger missed dissonance in this moment of heightened
surveillance and conformity.
Most recently, use of When Prophecy Fails and the theory of cognitive
dissonance to examine the science and religion debate can be found in Barbara Herrnstein
Smith’s book Natural Reflections.75
She brings both the study and its theory to bear on
some cognitive science and evolutionary theorists whose works naturalize notions of the
mind in religion and religious experience, what she terms the New Naturalist view of
cognition in the study of religion.76
On the one hand, she argues, are science’s efforts,
largely those of anthropologists and psychologists, to debunk religious experience as a
cognitive illusion or persistence of belief, echoing Festinger’s own emphasis on
persistence of belief. On the other hand, Herrnstein Smith finds a strand of work seeking
to square scientific accounts and religious beliefs of the natural world with arguments of
their overlap, what she deems the New Natural Theology.
These two intellectual projects, she argues, mirror one another in any number of
ways, including their persistence of belief and their lexical-conceptual knot of the natural
versus supernatural. One senses Herrnstein Smith’s interest lies mostly with particular
forms of science-religion debate where either side surrenders to what she calls “cognitive
conservatism,” a persistence of belief that closes off ways to understand and pursue
science and/or religion. Her interest circles back primarily to matters of epistemology.
She therefore leaves unaddressed how science, religion and psychology have more
broadly worked hand-in-hand to naturalize certain understandings of cognition as of the
rational and as of the religious and spiritual. Their entanglements may also foreshorten
perspectives on cognitive forms by looking more and more to interior worlds, creating a
26
form of cognitive reductionism akin to the troublesome medical materialism identified by
William James.
One can hear this quest into deeper regions of inner space as well in recent
invocations of cognitive dissonance in the new neurotheology, claims of a frontal cortex
becoming rather lit up in atheists when asked to meditate on God: “It was almost like you
were seeing cognitive dissonance;” that is, “the brain being asked to focus on something
one has trouble with and it sets off all kinds of emotional alarms.”77
Whether cognitive dissonance is invoked as a phenomenon to evidence beliefs or
struggles with them, whether of religion or of science, and whether it is moved into new
domains of cognitive mapping, such as those performed by neuroscience and
neurotheology, what is overlooked, first, is how these fields’ interrelations continue to
define and delimit notions of cognition, science, psychology, religion and spirituality and
second, how these limited notions come to have a force of their own.
Jerome Bruner offered some insight into this current dilemma at the symposium
inaugurating psychology’s mid-twentieth century turn to cognition. He offered:
Festinger’s “conception of consonance and dissonance is in a fine and ancient tradition.
It is the psychology of Aesop.” He continues, “I respect the concepts of consonance and
dissonance the more for their ancient origin.” But, he reflects, if “one dips further into
folklore and literature, one soon finds … cases to the contrary, violations of consonance-
dissonance theory like ‘We look before and after/And long [pine] for what is not.’”78
His concern with scales of time here is about rhythmic patterns, history, and cosmic
27
recurrence, of how the smaller story of cognitive dissonance evokes larger and
longstanding ones.
Bruner gestures then toward a reductionism in Festinger’s theory and the larger
discipline’s formulation of cognition as one of foreshortening time and of contracting
meaning to algorithmic input-output renditions instead of humanity’s search for meaning,
a longing understood in that Jamesian multiverse sense of strung along types, or endings
without ends. In this, Bruner points to another 1950s debate concerning psychology at
the nexus of science and the humanities, a concern heightened by C. P. Snow’s article on
the more general relation of science and the humanities in the mid-1950s, known now by
its shorthand two cultures. Snow was concerned too with possible closure of worlds,
those lifelines running between the humanities and sciences.79
So the recurrence toward which Bruner invites a rehearing, at least as I read him,
is twofold. There is the cosmic recurrence. Dissonance and consonance echo across the
ages, reminding us of an intimate history between making new music and new
knowledge; of the technologies of the one lending themselves to new openings of
understanding the structure of the universe and of the “hidden and mysterious” universe
within us.80
The question of cognitive dissonance as of cognition is thus larger than
supposed by its initial formulation and current metamorphoses of it as an inner state or
particular spot in the brain. And there is the recurrence of relations amongst science,
psychology, religion and spirituality, one surfacing most recently with repeated reference
to the same text toward which Bruner gestures, C. P. Snow’s two cultures. Herrnstein
Smith directs her book toward this very debate, and, others, such as Roger Luckhurst,81
include this debate’s earlier nineteenth century iteration. Qualifying the two cultures
28
with the phrase “or the end of the world as we know it” Luckhurst signals his focus on
science and culture wars. Still, each attends to the importance of revisiting interchange
amongst science and religion. Here we must add psychology, too, for as this history of
When Prophecy Fails and cognitive dissonance argues, its interrelation with science and
religion is a constitutive one, generating all kinds of worlds, from those of inner tensions
to brain activity, and from activist tools to measures of psychological balance, order and
certainty.
One reviewer of Alison Lurie’s fictionalization of When Prophecy Fails depicted
her story as a tragic-comedy of the modern intellect. To pursue this history into the
modern subject is indeed, then, to sound a dissonant tone, the kind intended to stir up new
hearings of old compositions, to hear anew the constituent relation amongst science,
psychology, religion and spirituality in that larger pursuit of asking what does it mean to
be human, what’s it all about.
1 This paper is based on my public lecture of May 16th, 2014, presented while a senior fellow of the Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago. The paper has been revised for this web forum, and it represents parts of the book Revelation or Revolution, in preparation. Many thanks to Bill Schweiker, director, fellows of the Martin Marty Center, and Kelsey Crick of Shimer College for her research assistance. 2 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanely Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1956). 3 On religion becoming a little more psychological, see Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997). For a related but reverse case of the mid-twentieth century as a time when once more “Americans expected their psychologization to be complemented by a religious framework” (p. 71), see Peter Homans’ (1987) article, “Psychology and religion movement.” Encyclopedia of Religion, 12, 66-75. On cognitive psychology’s emerging status in the mid-1950s and this subject’s concern for the “subject of the identifiability of the referent in psychology”, see, for example, the book resulting from the 1955 Cognition Symposium held in Colorado, Contemporary Approaches to Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). See Egon Brunswik in this same volume for his
29
definition of the problem of cognition as the “problem of the acquisition of knowledge” (p. 6). His concern is with psychology failing to attend to the environment or ecology of an individual or species, an erasure Brunswik finds reminiscent of medieval theologians “who granted a soul to men but denied it to women” – the problem, as he deems it, is one of equality of subject and situation. Also see in this volume Jerome Bruner, one of the founders of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. 4 Chicago Daily News, December 16, 1954; Chicago American, December 20, 1954. 5 December 10, 1954, p. 3 6 ibid., p. 3 7 ibid., p. 3 8 See Google’s n-gram for relevant data; also Corpus of Contemporary American English of Brigham Young University data on frequency of use as tied more to print culture – magazines, fiction, newspapers, and academia – than to media talk (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). 9 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred, trans. M. DeBevoise (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013). 10 Elaine H. Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012). 11 Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2008). 12 Alex Ross, “Revelations,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322crmu_music?currentPage=all. 13 Rebecca Rischin, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet, Updated Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). 14 See, for example, Carol J. Oja, “Dane Rudhyar’s Vision of American Dissonance,” American Music 17, no. 2 (July 1, 1999): 129–45, doi:10.2307/3052711. 15 Alan P. Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (New York: Pantheon Books, 2013). 16 Problems in terminology are often highlighted by music theorists and historians, as is the matter of pairings of consonance with pleasantness and dissonance with unpleasantness and use of simple dichotomies. A good overview of these along with consonance and dissonance research in psychology from the 19th century onward is provided by Richard Parncutt and Graham Hair, “Consonance and Dissonance in Music Theory and Psychology: Disentangling Dissonant Dichotomies,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 119–66. Curiously the authors mention the cognitive dissonance at work in these category mistakes, without mention of how the term, and the theory it indicates, were themselves influenced by these struggles in meaning. 17 Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books;Distributed by MIT Press, 2010). Also see William Ennis Thomson, “Emergent Dissonance and the Resolution of a Paradox,” College Music Symposium: Journal of the College Music Society 36 (1996),
30
http://cms.axiom4.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2127:emergent-dissonance-and-the-resolution-of-a-paradox. 18 Thomson, “Emergent Dissonance and the Resolution of a Paradox.” 19 Thomson, “Emergent Dissonance and the Resolution of a Paradox.” 20 See discussion of Rudhyar and Seeger in Oja, “Dane Rudhyar’s Vision of American Dissonance.” 21 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). Also see, Betty M. Bayer, “Wonder in a World of Struggle?” Subjectivity, 23, (July 2008): 156-173; Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Michael W. Scott, “The Anthropology of Ontology (religious Science?),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 859–72, doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12067. 22 For discussion of dissonance, sound and psyche, see, for example, Dariusz Gafijczuk, Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle: Redesigning Perception, Routledge Studies in Cultural History 22 (New York: Routledge, 2014). 23 Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 24 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 1902), p. 17. 25 Ibid., p. 14. 26 Isabelle Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (2011): 56-7. 27 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Camnbridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 197-98. 28 Anne Harrington, The Cure within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), p.22. 29 Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 171. 30 Ibid., 167. 31 Corinna Treitel, “What the Occult Reveals,” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 3 (2009): 611–25. 32 Alex Owen, Place of Enchantment : British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10366822. 33 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, p. 501. 34 In this study, ethics questions arise from the research social psychologists donning disguise to study and publish their findings without the consent of the participants. To some social scientists the ends may justify the means, but, to others, this is not a means to redeem the ends. On another level, social psychology and other fields within psychology often invoke science to redeem their epistemological status. 35 Wai Chee Dimock, “Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71.
31
36 Ajay Heble, “Sounds of Change: Dissonance, History, and Cultural Listening,” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 71 (Fall 2000): 26–36. 37 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 316. 38 Kathryn Lofton, “Religious History as Religious Studies,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 383–94, doi:10.1080/0048721X.2012.681878. 39 “Glenn Gould Radio Documentary - The Idea of North,” CBC.ca Player, accessed June 4, 2014, /player/Radio/More+Shows/Glenn+Gould+-+The+CBC+Legacy/Audio/1960s/ID/2110447480/. 40 Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff, “Schoenberg’s Philosophy of Composition: Thoughts on the ‘Musical Idea and Its Presentation,’” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 150. 41 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 313. 42 To define his multiverse, James, drawing on Alfred North Whitehead, writes “If you prefer Greek words you may call it the synchrestic type.” William James, A Pluralistic Universe (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011). 43 Ibid., 91. 44 Here is one of those serendipitous encounters, a chamber opera of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience composed by Gene Pritsker. The composition is said to defy categorization, and as the reviewer writes: “what is center stage is the barrage of cognitive dissonances—narrative drama vs. non-linear narrative, sacred vs. profane, contemporaneity vs. historicism.” Frank J. Oteri on September 25, 2012, “Sounds Heard: Gene Pritsker—William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience,” NewMusicBox, accessed April 23, 2014, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/sounds-heard-gene-pritsker-william-james-varieties-of-religious-experience/. 45 Wai Chee Dimock, “Resonance.” 46 Ibid., pp. 1062, 1067 47 I am borrowing and modifying here Bynum’s idea of mutation or metamorphosis, and of how change inspired wonder, to ask how or if one thing can become another, or “where something goes when it becomes something else.” By analogy, one may wonder how prophecies and failed prophecies become ways to understand ourselves, signs of madness, felt disappointments, or measures of the history of conscious and unconscious life. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York; Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 2001), pp. 192-
3. 48 Festinger’s notion of a psychological environment was shaped by his close working relation with Kurt Lewin, and Lewin’s topographical approach to psychology. The notion is thus expansive, covering place, time, people, feelings, thoughts, interactions, social influence and so on. 49 Proposal, Charles Y. Glock, Managing Director, Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, May 16, 1952, Box 1, Leon Festinger, “Leon Festinger Papers 1939-1988; 1965-1985,” Bentley Historical Archives, University of Michigan. 50 Memorandum, Notes from Staff meeting, November 20 & 21, 1952, Ibid.
32
51 Memorandum, from May Brodbeck, January 22, 1953, Ibid. 52 Memorandum, Notes from Staff Meeting, November 28, 1952, Ibid. 53 Memorandum, Notes from Staff Meeting, February 9, 1953, Ibid. 54 Inventory summary of Rachel Reese Sady’s 1948 dissertation, “The Function of Rumors in Relocation Centers,” University of Chicago PhD Thesis, Box 1, Ibid. 55 Inventory summary of J. Prasad’s “The Psychology of Rumor: A Study Relating to the Great Indian Earthquake of 1934,” British Journal of Psychology 26, 1935, Festinger, “Leon Festinger Papers 1939-1988; 1965-1985.” 56 Clara Endicott Sears, Days of Delusion; A Strange Bit of History (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924). 57 Ibid., p. xxii. 58 Ibid., p. xxi. 59 Emerson quoted in Sears, Ibid., p. xxi. 60 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 1st ed. (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 7. 61 Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 62 Ibid., 216. 63 Riesman was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, September 27, 1954, in the article pp. 22-25. The article on Peale appeared on November 1, 1954, describing his message on religion redemption as less about “redemption by suffering” and more about a way to “rise above sorrow,” 68. 64 Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010). 65 Chicago Tribune, 1954, a7. 66 This photograph, despite being taken by the highly recognized photographer Charles E. Knoblock, was never published in any newspaper. 67 Alison Lurie Imaginary Friends (NY: Coward-McCann, 1967). “Imaginary Friends” Adapted by Malcolm Bradbury (3 x 55 minute series, from the novel of the same title by Alison Lurie). Director: Peter Sasdy. With Alison Steadman, etc. Thames TV for ITV. Shown 22-24 June, 1987. http://malcolmbradbury.com/tv_the_novelist_and_television_drama.html accessed May 14, 2014. 68 Festinger papers. 69 http://www.isitso.org/guide/fails.html 70 “De-Conversion Stories | Cognitive Dissonance the Podcast,” accessed June 6, 2014, http://dissonancepod.com/?page_id=509. 71 Data gathered thus far from 1956 to 1979 indicate religion and theology’s near parallel use of When Prophecy Fails and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in journal articles and reviews, using ATLA, Humanities International and a broader search in JSTOR (for religious studies citations). 72 Catherine Wessinger, The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (Oxford University Press, 2011). Also instructive are the many variations on Festinger et al.’s title When Prophecy Fails, including, for example, Robert P. Carroll’s When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament (NY:
33
Seabury Press, 1979); Matthew N. Schmalz, “When Festinger Fails: Prophecy and the Watch Tower,” Religion 24, (1994): 293-308; and, Diana G. Tumminia, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group (NY: Oxford University Press, 2005). 73 Edwin Boring, “Cognitive Dissonance: Its Use in Science,” Science 145 (1964): 680–85. 74 Solomon Asch, “Cacophonophobia,” Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews 3, no. 7 (1958): 194–95. 75 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion, Terry Lectures Series (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). 76 Most recently, a version of this approach appeared in the April 4, 2014 Sunday NY Times article “Is that Jesus in Your Toast?” explaining the psychological phenomena of seeing something significant in ambiguous stimuli through the theory of cognitive priming, a readiness to see such images thought to be set off by wishes for a moral or just order during times of conflict. 77 See Newberg in 1615 L. Street et al., “How Our Brains Are Wired for Belief,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, accessed May 12, 2014, http://www.pewforum.org/2008/05/05/how-our-brains-are-wired-for-belief/. 78 Jerome Bruner, “Discussion,” in University of Colorado (Boulder campus), Department of Psychology and Jerome S. (Jerome Seymour) Bruner, Contemporary Approaches to Cognition: A Symposium Held at the University of Colorado (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). 79 C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures,” New Statesman and Nation, October 6, 1956, http://search.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/docview/1306902569/citation?accountid=14657. 80 Penelope Gouk, “Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 87–105. 81 Roger Luckhurst, “The Two Cultures, or the End of the World as We Know It,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (March 2007): 55–64, doi:10.1179/030801807X163698.